March 2017

Intro

This is the first blog from my new site (host). The intent is to provide some outlines of the wacky graphics explorations (WebGL, three.js) I have been trying out. During the day I manage a large open-source project (readium.org) and do some consulting in digital publishing. Not much scope for playing with graphics. At the same time, in the distant past I was a university professor, specializing in hydrology, permafrost and GIS. Don’t do much of that anymore either… 🙂 So I spend my spare time playing with scientific visualization of some of my experiments (when I am not in my woodshop). My website is here, my github account here, and my LinkedIn profile here.

Intent

The intent of the blog is to provide some color and explanations of the details, motivations and experience in some of the graphics and digital publishing explorations I have been doing. On my website Geo-F/X I’ll post the result of my explorations on my website. Here in the blog I’ll look at and discuss how and why they came to be.

Three.js and NeHe

I’ll start out the blogs with a recent project of mine, implementing the legacy NeHe demos with three.js and WebGL. I did a lot of work in OpenGL at one point, back in the early days of OpenGL (when little worked correctly) and the NeHe demos were nice cool intros. I was busy writing PostScript interpreters (for Eicon and QMS) so OpenGL was just a hobby. More recently, after a number of excursions (GIS, SVG, working at Adobe then eBooks and digital publishing, I decided to look into WebGL as the browser support was getting pretty good.

I came across three.js and it looked cool, so I decided to amuse myself by implementing the NeHe demos in three.js. Turned out to be more work than I expected, but the code is all done and most of the “tutorials” are as well. Hope to complete them very soon. In the meantime, I am going to start blogging about the first couple of dozen which are all done. You can see the results here and the sources are on Github here.